WIX Archives
Now is a good time...
Posted by bdk on Tue Jul 30, 2002 01:30:55 PM
In reply top Re: Corsair mainspar posted by Rob Mears on Tue Jul 30, 2002 05:42:46 AM
Now is a good time to do this kind of work because the real aerospace shops are quite slow due to 9/11.
I would think that with numerical control programs and such (rather than tracer mills that were likely used), making Corsair spar caps would be easier now than it was back in the day. It just depends if a Corsair is worth enough money to make it feasible. Nowadays it is common to hog out components from bar stock in lieu of special extrusions.
I agree that it would be very difficult to make these spar caps without a numerically controlled mill, a stretch forming fixture to curve the caps, intermediate annealing and heat treating steps, and a finish machining step.
The bottom line is that Vought tooled for thousands of aircraft and you would be tooling for just a few. You have many fewer units to amortize the tooling and manufacturing engineering hours over.
: From what I understand, the size of the commonly available
: aluminum stock needed to create the spars is not cut larg
: e enough to equal the pieces used in the original design.
: Custom forgings are required to make this work.
:
: Secondly,from what I unsderstand those pieces then have to
: be rolled into shape to create the inverted-gull shape of
: the spar. The factory responsible for the original produ
: ction pieces had mammoth custom tooling to complete this j
: ob, the likes of which is not still extant AFAIK. To the
: best of my knowlege these are the two main hurdles one has
: to overcome.
:
: Tom Reiley of course reproduced a main spar for the Silber
: man "F4U-4" (now owned by Jim Frye). Mr. Reiley actually
: deviated from the original design, managing to reproduce
: an airworthy mainspar using different techniques that were
: approved by the FAA. I spoke with him just after his com
: pletion of the unit, but I don't really recall the minute
: details in his description of the work.
:
: Nice to know that it can be done though :) I can think of
: two or three F4U projects right now that could use a spar
: to get them kick started.